Tags: fall, BC, trees, leaves, john koetsier

Recently read …

Cusp, by Robert A Metzger
Wow. Mind-altering. Awesome. Couldn’t put it down.
Belgarath the Sorcerer by David and Leigh Eddings
Yawn. Shouldn’t have picked it up - Eddings is for 12-year olds - but I have this silly thing about finishing books I start.
The Guns of Normandy by George G Blackburn
Sobering - a personal, real, dirty […]

Back from trick-or-treating with the kids.
Ethan counted his candy, and he’s got 135 chocolate bars, bags of chips, and assorted other candies. The other kids have about the same.
We didn’t go to that many homes …. many just give out 6 or 7 candies at a time.
Sheesh - when I was a kid we […]

Ethan, this is how you type without looking at the keyboard. You just have to know where all the keys are, and then it is very, very, easy.
(Typed with my eyes closed - mostly - to prove a point to my 7-year-old son, Ethan.)
Tags: typing, kids, son, ethan, john koetsier […]

Remembering our recent California vacation … it seemed so long and now it seems so long ago.
Here Ethan is outpacing a wave on Ocean Beach, just south of San Francisco. Note the beautiful sparkly black sand.

Draco by Ian Watson
Wow. Very good can’t-put-it-down sciency fiction. Watson’s language and word-choice is extremely innovative - a succulent read for a lover of books and language.
Capital Offense by Armin Shimerman
Just OK. Ends with a fizzle, as if the author and the protagonist just plain ran out of energy.
Fools Errant by Matthew Hughes
Really super-excellently […]

My 7-year old son Ethan is continually amazing me with his insights, thoughts, and questions. He’s not the most verbal or social of kids, but he is a (young) man of ideas.
Today, entirely unprompted, he came up with the idea of intergenerational starships.
After all, he figured, you can’t get to the nearest stars (he started […]

It’s rather self-explanatory, don’t you think? Here’s Aidan, my 3-year old:

A list of books I’ve read recently, along with a very short pass/fail recommendation:

Gregory Benford’s In the Ocean of Night
Pass - not up to his usual standards.
Stephen Baxter’s Exultant
Baxter is always mind-blowingly amazing.
Beyond Flesh
A compilation of short science fiction stories - very, very good.
Through Gates of Splendor
The story of Elisabeth Elliot and 4 missionaries who […]

Sickening story in the NY Times on hazardous waste disposal in the new millenium:

It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands.

This is getting to be a very complicated world.
Tags: NY times, hazardous waste, […]